Tay Vaughan - Making Multimedia

13th Korea International Exhibition for
Computers, Software & Communications
Korea Exhibition Center
Seoul, Korea
May 20, 1994

Presentation of Tay Vaughan

Download Speech in Korean [PDF]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Multimedia '94! My name is Tay Vaughan. I am President of an American multimedia company based in Oakland, California. We design and make CD-ROM-based multimedia products. And I am the author of the best-selling book, Multimedia: Making It Work, published internationally by McGraw-Hill, and available in Korean.

This afternoon I wish to talk about how to make multimedia out of an idea. About how you can apply this New Art Form and this New Literature to the real world. I will talk about the equipment and the skills required to develop a multimedia project, from concept to delivery.

There is an unstoppable revolution underway, made possible by technology: the way humans access and learn information (and the nature of the information itself) is evolving as a synthesis far more complex and powerful than the liberation of the printed word that occured 500 years ago in middle Europe.

That last revolution in the way humans access information, led by Gutenberg, Aldus, and others, yielded powerful and long-lasting changes, many of which certainly exceeded the imaginations of that day. Twenty years from now, we will be amazed by the tangible results of our own multimedia revolution. Who can predict the social, economic, and cultural ricochet? What, indeed, will the results of our work yield in a hundred years, or four hundred? Someone among us, here in this room, may become multimedia's Gutenberg, a creative and engineering talent who will truly alter the human condition!

Multimedia is an eerie wail as two cat's eyes appear on a dark screen.

It's the red rose that dissolves into a little girl's face when you press "Valentine's Day."

Multimedia is a catalog of fancy gift items, and a guide to help you buy one. Multimedia is a real-time video conference with three colleagues in Paris, London, and Hong Kong on your office computer. At home, multimedia is an algebra or geography lesson for a young student. At the arcade, it's goggle-faced kids flying fighter planes in sweaty virtual reality.

Multimedia is any combination of text, sound, graphic art, animation, and video delivered to you by computer or other electronic means. It is richly-presented sensation. When you weave together the sensual elements of multimedia - dazzling pictures and animations, engaging sounds, compelling video clips, and raw textual information searched and retrieved - you can electrify the thought and action centers of people's minds. When you give them interactive control of the process, they can be enchanted. Multimedia excites eyes, ears, fingertips, and, most importantly, your head.

You need hardware, software, and good ideas to make multimedia. To make GOOD multimedia, you need talent and skill.

First, let's talk about hardware

Selecting the proper platform for developing your multimedia project may be based on your personal preference of computer, your budget constraints, project delivery requirements, and the type of material and content in the project. Most multimedia developers in the United States and in Europe agree, nonetheless, that multimedia development is smoother on the Macintosh than in Windows, even though projects destined to run in Windows must then be ported across platforms. Hardware and authoring software tools for Windows are improving, however, so it will not be long before you can produce the same multimedia project with equal ease in either the Windows or Macintosh environment.

Soon, also, there will be other multimedia production environments that achieve wide-spread notice. In 1991, Apple, IBM, and Motorola formed an alliance to design and build a new generation of computers that use reduced instruction-set computing (RISC) microprocessors. This PowerPC hardware family bridges both Macintosh and PC environments, and will become commonly available in 1994.

No matter what platform you choose, you should follow "Vaughan's Rule for Keeping-up;"

Upgrade to proven products that lie in the calm water slightly behind the leading edge of the wave.

Hardware and software vendors are understandably attracted to the PC world because there have been many more PCs sold than Macintoshes, as you can see in this table. For many multimedia vendors, each PC computer represents a potential upgrade sale. Until IBM redesigned the PC to use proprietary hardware (the PS/2 series), the functionality of the AT-bus PC could be copied or cloned by other hardware manufacturers. Many computers from other manufacturers with widely varying features became available, offering more or fewer special capabilities according to that manufacturer's market strategy and production costs. Even today, not all PCs provide the sound and graphics features necessary to make and display multimedia.

The Multimedia Personal Computer, or MPC, is an industry-wide effort begun in the late 1980s to provide a standardized and capable multimedia computing environment for PCs. However, an MPC computer is not required for you to create multimedia presentations on PCs. Though few multimedia authoring and delivery tools are designed strictly for the DOS environment, some of these are quite extensive. But more multimedia tools are becoming available for Windows--and many multimedia applications are being ported from the Macintosh to Windows.

When enhanced with Windows 3.1, a sound board, and SuperVGA graphics, the PC readily challenges the Macintosh in delivering excellent audio and visual presentations. An MPC computer, moreover, will always provide sound capability, a CD-ROM player, access to the Media Control Interface (MCI) for extensions to video overlay boards and other peripherals, and minimum CPU and memory configuration.

The multimedia toolset is currently biased in one direction: from Macintosh to Windows. If you create a multimedia project using an authoring tool such as Director or Authorware on a Mac, you can convert it to run in Windows; if you make a QuickTime movie with Premiere or VideoShop on the Mac, you can convert it to play as an .AVI file in Windows; you can convert a HyperCard stack using ConvertIt! to run it as a ToolBook book. Crossing platforms in either direction, however, can be a trauma of font, palette, and format inconsistency; crossing against the present Mac/Windows bias may put you into the intensive care ward.

What skills are required to make multimedia?

A recent study in the United States reported that physicians, dentists, and computer scientists share highest honors for the most respected professions. Are multimedia developers computer scientists? Or are they programmers, graphic artists, musicians, animators, storyboard craftspeople, instructional designers, and/or Renaissance authors?

Video producers become expert with computer-generated animations and MIDI controls for their edit suites. Architects become bored with two-dimensional drafting and create three-space animated walk-throughs. Classical painters learn the electronic elements of red, green, and blue and create fantastic computer-based artwork. A multimedia developer might be any or all of these and typically fits no traditional management information systems mold; many have never seen a line of COBOL code or booted up an IBM 3090 mainframe.

Leonardo DaVinci, the Renaissance man, was scientist, architect, builder, creative designer, craftsman, and poet folded into one. To produce good multimedia, you will need a similar diverse range of skills -- detailed knowledge of computers, text, graphic arts, sound, and video.

These skills, the multimedia skillset, may be available in a single individual, but more likely from a composite of a few or many individuals working as a team. Complex multimedia projects are, indeed, often assembled by teams of artists and computer craftspeople. Many job titles and collaborative team roles for multimedia development are being adapted from a mix of motion picture industry and computer software industry experiences.

A multimedia team usually consists of:

Multimedia Information Designers, including

Image processing specialists

Instructional designers &

Multimedia Programmers

If you are new to multimedia and are facing a major investment in hardware and software, and the investment of time to learn each new tool, take a gradual approach. Begin by studying each element of multimedia and learning one or more tools for creating and editing that element. Get to know how to use text and fonts, how to make and edit colorful graphic images and animate them into movies, and how to record and edit digital sound. Read the books and computer trade periodicals that contain the most up-to-date information. Your skills will be most valuable if you develop a broad foundation of knowledge about each of the basic elements.

Producing a multimedia project requires more than creative skill and high technology. You need organizing and business talent as well.

Issues of ownership and copyright will be attached to some elements that you wish to use: text from books, scanned images from magazines, audio and video clips. These require permission and often payment of a fee to the owner - your team may also need professional legal advice. Indeed, the management and production infrastructure of a multimedia project may be as intense and complicated as the technology and creative skills you bring to bear in rendering it.

How do you make multimedia?

The five basic stages in building a multimedia project are idea processing, planning, production, testing, and delivering. Some developers claim these stages should be called calm, chop, storm, chaos, and deliverance.

Let's talk about Idea Processing

A multimedia project always begins with an idea or a need that you refine by outlining your desired messages and objectives. Identify how you will make each message and objective work within your authoring system. Before you begin developing, plan what writing skills, graphic art, music, video, and other multimedia expertise will be required.

Develop a creative graphic look and feel, as well as a structure and navigation system that will let the viewer visit the messages and content.

The most precious asset you can bring to the multimedia workshop is your creativity. It's what separates run-of-the-mill and "underwhelming" multimedia from compelling, engaging, and award-winning product, whether for a short sales presentation viewed solely by colleagues within your firm or for a full-blown CD-ROM title.

Choosing your subject matter, then determining how a user will interact with and navigate through the content requires great attention to the message, the scripting or storyboarding, the artwork, and the programming. You can break an entire project with a badly designed interface. You can also break a project with inadequate or inaccurate content.

In making multimedia today, there is a lot of room for creative risk-taking because the rules for what works and what doesn't work are still being empirically discovered; there are few known formulas for the success of multimedia. Indeed, companies that produce a terrific multimedia title are usually rewarded in the marketplace. Then competitors quickly reverse engineer the product, and six months later "knock-offs" using similar successful approaches and techniques appear on the market.

Even the best-selling Just Grandma and Me from Brøderbund is an extension of techniques used in an earlier successful HyperCard children's game, Cosmic Osmo...

which in turn was based on experiments with interactive virtual desktops in HyperCard.

An excellent multimedia title recently developed in Paris by Arboresence, Peter's Numbers Adventure, goes beyond Grandma and Me.

While many developers are hoping to make the "VisiCalc of Multimedia," or the software that is so good that consumers BUY computers just to use it, it may well be that no single multimedia project or trick will be the breakthrough INVENTION that VisiCalc's spreadsheets provided during the early days of the PC: users bought computer systems just so they could use that software! It is likely that multimedia will be gradually improved and made more powerful in incremental steps, by INNOVATION, where developers build upon existing technologies, ideas, and approaches. This is the basic nature of change.

To successfully reduce your ideas to practice, you must be familiar with what is possible and not possible in the realm of multimedia; familiar with what is limited and unlimited by both hardware and software. Indeed, you will find it is difficult to stay informed and keep up with the frothy leading edge of the multimedia wave.

Now Let's talk about Planning

Once you have your ideas formulated, you need to be sure you have enough money, time, and talent to pull it off.

Treat your multimedia idea as a business venture. As you visualize in your mind's eye what you want to accomplish, balance the project's profit potential against the investment of effort and resources required to make it happen.

Estimate the time needed to do all elements, and prepare a budget. Work up a short prototype or proof-of-concept to give you a reality-check.

Planning for multimedia projects is like cellular fission: the big picture of your idea is divided into production phases and then divided again into smaller and more manageable tasks and items spread over a given amount of time. These manageable tasks are the building blocks of project management.

One of the problems you face is that making multimedia is not a repetitive manufacturing process, like making cookies or auto parts, where you can stamp out piece after piece. Rather, multimedia is by its very nature a continuous research and development effort characterized by creative trial and error. Each new project is somewhat different from the last, and each may require application of many different tools and solutions. The first time you accomplish a multimedia task, it will demand great effort as you learn the software and hardware tools and the techniques required. The second time you do a similar task, you will already know where the tools are and how they work, and the task will require less effort. You should be profitable by the third time you perform a task.

Once you have your idea fleshed out and have budgeted and planned how you will get it done, you can begin the production stage.

Production is the phase when your multimedia project is actually rendered. During this phase you will contend with important and continuing organizing tasks. There will be times in a complex project when graphics files seem to disappear from the server, when you forget to send or cannot produce milestone progress reports, when your voice talent gets lost on the way to the recording studio, or when your hard disk crashes.

Multimedia elements are typically sewn together into a project using authoring tools. These software tools are designed to manage individual multimedia elements and provide user interaction. Images, sounds and movies are usually created with editing tools dedicated to these media, and then the elements are imported into the authoring system for playback.

The sum of what gets played back is the human interface, and this interface is just as much the rules for what happens to the user's input as it is the actual graphics on the screen. The hardware and software that govern the limits of what can happen here are the multimedia platform or environment.

For many multimedia developers, following the plan and actually doing the construction work--being down in the trenches of hands-on creation and production--is the fun part of any project.

HyperCard, SuperCard, Macromedia Director, ToolBook, and other commonly used authoring platforms may allow access to the software programming code or script that drives your particular project. In such an open-code environment, are you prepared to let others see your programming work? Is your code neat and commented? Perhaps your mother cautioned you to wear clean underwear in case you were suddenly among strangers in a hospital emergency room--well, apply this rule to your code. You can insert a copyright statement in your project that clearly (and legally) designates the code as your intellectual property, but the code, tricks, and programming techniques remain accessible for study, learning, and tweaking by others.

Always test your multimedia programs. If they lock up or glitch out, user's will condemn your project before it gets off the ground.

Test it, then test it again; that's the unavoidable rule. Do this before the work is finalized and released for public or client consumption. A bad reputation earned by premature product release can destroy an otherwise excellent piece of work representing thousands of hours of effort. If you need to, delay the release of the work to be sure that it is as good as possible. It's critical that you take the time to thoroughly exercise your project and fix both big and little problems; in the end, you will save yourself a great deal of agony!

One of the major difficulties you face in testing the operation of your multimedia project is that its performance depends on specific hardware and system configurations. If you cannot control the end user's platform, or if the project is designed to be shown in many different environments, you must fully test your project on as many platforms as possible. Remember to budget for obtaining the hardware test platforms, as well as for the many hours of effort the testing will require!

As you move through the testing process toward a final release, you may want to use terms that indicate the current version status of your project: bronze when you are close to being finished, gold when you have determined there is nothing left to change or correct and are ready to reproduce copies from your golden master. Some software developers also use the term release candidate (with a version number) as they continue to refine the product and approach a golden master. Going gold, or announcing that the job is finished and then shipping, can be a scary thing. Indeed, if you examine the file creation time and date for many software programs, you will discover that many went gold at two o'clock in the morning!

In the multimedia world today, delivering to the consumer channel is the least understood stage of the multimedia process. In fact, for PUBLISHING multimedia, a different team of people with different skillsets is usually employed.

Clearly, the marketplace will drive the success of high-visibility multimedia projects. Consumers will pay real money for good works, whether on CD-ROM, from a centrally-served 500-channel television system, or from an international data highway. With real money in hand, developers will then create even more and improved material... and the leading edge of the multimedia wave will move forward. This is the nature of the multimedia revolution.

Before I end, I want to talk about The Multimedia Marketplace

The largest market share of CD-ROM playback equipment is in the computer environment, not the television set-top environment, with the Windows-based MPC platform maintaining an advantage over Macintosh-based systems. The available installed base of multimedia-equipped computers in U.S. households at the end of 1993 was 3.8 million: 2.5 million MPCs and 1.3 million Macintoshes. The installed base of CD-ROM players grew 300% from the end of 1992 to the end of 1993. The installed base of CD-ROM players is expected to triple again in 1994. The available installed base is that fraction of the projected installed base into which consumer/mass market and business titles can be sold.

Other CD-ROM players can be connected directly to a television, such as the Compact Disc-Interactive ("CD-I") player from Philips, the Photo CD player from Kodak, and the 3DO player. Both the 3DO and CD-I systems display graphics and animation and play stereo-quality sound. The combined installed base for Photo CD, CD-I, and 3DO, however, is less than 250,000 units, and consumers seem to prefer purchasing computers with CD-ROM capability rather than these specialized and expensive set-top devices. The installed base of set-top CD-ROM players will not increase fast enough to justify producing titles specific to them at this time, and these devices soon will be supplanted in the marketplace by a new breed of set-top "boxes" (which may also include CD-ROM players) that are linked to the interactive data highway.

Only 1% of the multimedia market has been tapped, and there will be an 80% annual growth rate over the next three years. By 1997, the multimedia market will be worth $9 billion in computer sales and $15 billion in consumer sales.

While sales of interactive programs on computer disks still outstrip CD-ROM sales, several things happened in 1992 and 1993 to stimulate consumer acquisition of CD-ROM titles.

First... Multimedia products were bundled with up-grade hardware, introducing millions of consumers to the variety and versatility of interactive titles.

Second... Multimedia development tools became very powerful and capable: newer CD-ROM titles incorporate sophisticated video, 3-D graphics, and game-like structures.

Third... The retail price of individual titles declined over these two years: from an average of $129 per title to $59 per title. During 1993 the price reduction rate was 6% per month.

Finally... Products increasingly became available in channels other than software retail outlets: at video and audio outlets, through catalogs and direct mail, and (by the end of 1993) at video rental chains.

There is rapid growth in the consumer market for CD-ROM titles, triggered by the penetration of multimedia-equipped computers as well as downward pressures on title prices. Consumer sales are on the rise. With a market size of $3 billion in 1993, increasing to $15 billion in 1997, this is a clearly high-growth market - an exciting place to be.

Platform	1993 Installed Base	Est. 1994 Installed Base	Est. 1995 Installed Base
MPC (or equiv.)	2,300,000	3,000,000	4,500,000
Macintosh	1,175,000	2,000,000	4,000,000
Total	3,475,000	5,000,000	8,500,000

MS DOS PC	2,650,000
Sega	800,000
Photo CD	95,000
Philips CD-I	80,000
Other	355,000
Total	7,455,000